Dr. Lorin Anderson Podcast
Interview Transcript—Part One
Interview conducted by Dal Edwards
April 8, 2009
12:15-1:00
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Lorin Anderson is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina. He
has researched and published in the areas of classroom instruction and school learning,
effective programs and practices for economically disadvantaged children and youth,
the allocation and use of school time, and effective assessment. He is the senior editor
and contributor to A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of
Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives published in 2001.
He is currently consulting with North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction in the
revision of the content standards.
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We are here at the Department of Public Instruction with Dr. Lorin Anderson who is in the
middle of a day consulting with various sections of DPI on the standards revision process.
Dr. Anderson, thank you for agreeing to do this podcast interview with the Social Studies
section here at DPI. We appreciate your time.
Question: "Why was there a need for a revised Bloom's Taxonomy (RBT) and what is the
difference between the old taxonomy and RBT?"
Anderson: (1:30) Well, let me set it in a kind of historical context. I was a student of
Bloom back in the early seventies. And in 1994, I was asked by the National Society for
the Study of Education to edit a book on a retrospective view of what was then known
as Bloom’s Taxonomy--the original.
And we put together a bunch of chapters where we looked at it in both a historical and
contemporary context. And one of the authors that we asked to write was a man
named David Krathwohl, who was one of the participants in the group that put together
the original Bloom’s taxonomy. Bloom was alive at the time and he actually wrote the
first chapter and it was the last thing he published—was the chapter of that book.
The book went over very well, which suggested to a lot of us that there…that it was still
being used and recognized. And David Krathwohl contacted me and asked if I wanted
to work on a revision of the taxonomy because he still had the rights to the original
publisher. So we talked for a while and we said it was too big a job just for the two of us
to do it. We needed to bring together experts in various fields, like cognitive psychology,
curriculum, assessment (and) evaluation. When you look at the revised Bloom’s
taxonomy, there are two editors—David and I—and there were six authors. They wrote
different sections of it and we tried to kind of put it together.
The basic reason to do it over was that there had been a lot of work done in terms of
how to classify objectives between 1956—when the original taxonomy was written—and
1996 when we started to meet. And so we reviewed a lot of that work and it turned out
that there were around twenty different attempts to come up with different category
systems and different classification systems—all going back to the original taxonomy. So
they were all attempts to update it. And so we used all of that information to kind of
figure out what the new, improved version of the Bloom’s taxonomy would be. And one
of the things that stood out was it had to be two-dimensional. The original taxonomy was
one dimensional—knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and
evaluation (3:45).
The reason it had to be two dimensional was because of the structure of objectives. An
objective is simply a statement of what we intend a student to learn as a result of the
instruction we provide. As we looked at the statements of these objectives, we realized
that they all had a common format—subject, verb, object. And the subject was always
the student, or students. And…and elementary teachers had it really codified. It was
always TLW, which is “The learner will”, which was the student, BAT, which was “be able
to”. The next one after the TLW BAT was a verb. They’ll comprehend. They’ll use. They’ll
analyze. They’ll make judgements about. There was always some verb. And then there
was an object to the sentence. And the object tended to be the content. So it was the
“subtraction algorithm”, it was “forms of poetry”.
And because of that structure, “SVO”, that we needed one dimension for the “V” and
one dimension for the “O”. And so we realized at that point in time, that the original
taxonomy, even though the forms were nouns—knowledge, comprehension—they really
were intended to function as verbs. It would have been better if they had written
them—“know”, “comprehend”, “apply” and so forth. So we took…those six categories
of the original and we made them into verbs.
(5:11) And we changed some of the terms—that “know”…students will know things,
there were so many different ways of what people thought of “knowing”. So we
changed that to “remember”. Students will “remember” things. And we changed
“comprehension” to “understand”. A student will “understand” things. Students will do
things with what they know and understand, we call that “apply”, which was a direct
translation from “application”. Then came “analyze”. Then we got to the top and we
realized that “synthesize” was not particularly communicative to teachers. As we talked
more we realized that “create” is really what “synthesize” meant—putting together things
in new ways for a particular purpose. And if we had “create”, we actually moved
“evaluate” down one. Evaluation used to be at the highest of the original, now it’s
second to the highest in the revised. So you just need to learn a new mantra. Instead of
“knowledge”, “comprehension”, and so forth, you have to learn “remember”,
“understand”, “apply”, “analyze”, “evaluate”, “create” (6:15).
The old part of the objective…the object part of the objective was more problematic,
because we had to find some way of cutting across subject areas. All content is subject
specific. The science content is not the same as the math content. It’s not the same as
the language-arts content and art content. So we went deep into cognitive psychology
and we came up with what we called “types of knowledge”. And there were four types
of knowledge that we came up with. They are “factual knowledge”, which is kind of
knowledge of facts and terms; “conceptual knowledge”, which is knowledge of
categories, and relationships among categories. High levels of conceptual knowledge
are things like theories, structures, and so forth; “procedural knowledge”, which is really
knowledge on how to do things. Procedural knowledge is typically sequential—first you
do this, then you do that, then you do that, and so forth. Then we added a fourth
category called “metacognitive knowledge”—which is knowledge that is unique really
to the learner. It’s knowledge of how a particular learner approaches a given task in
schools. It’s knowing whether you’re better with multiple choice tests, than essays. It’s
knowing what your interests are—knowledge of study strategies, how you study best. A
lot of what we call learning styles is really metacognitive knowledge—it’s knowing that I
prefer to learn by myself as opposed to around other people. Or I need a certain
amount of quiet, because I’m easily distracted by noise, just even in the hall.
(7:48) So we ended up with a two dimensional table. One dimension we call the
cognitive process dimension. The second one we call the knowledge dimension. The
cognitive process dimension helps to understand the verb part of the “subject-verbobject”. And the knowledge dimension helps to understand the object part of the
“subject-verb-object”. And the system is set up so it’s equally applicable across subject
areas—whether its reading, writing, math, science, art, music, auto repair…And also
equally applicable across grade levels—whether you’re talking about second grade,
fifth grade, third grade, eighth grade, high school. So we tried to make it in a way that
was the most generalizable possible. And we tried to use terms and words all the way
through it that were teacher friendly. Once a teacher understands procedural
knowledge as a sequence of steps it’s…and teachers do talk about, “I teach
procedures”, or “I teach algorithms” if you’re in math. Or “I teach methods” if I’m in
math. Or “I teach techniques” if I’m in music. But they’re all procedural issues.
The hardest thing that teachers have to, to understand is the difference between factual
knowledge and conceptual knowledge. That’s the one we struggled with.
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